An ongoing project by artists Michael Smith and Joshua White, Open House was commissioned by the New Museum, and presented in its lower level public gallery in 1999 when the institution still resided on Broadway. In this version, Open House was a large-scale installation of a Soho artist’s loft belonging to the fictional artist “Mike Smith,” who is created and played by the artist Michael Smith and who, viewers learned through a video-taped sales pitch playing in the entrance to the installation, has lived in the loft for over twenty years, and is now looking to sell it. According to the pitch, the new owner will inherit the loft and, in a gesture that lies somewhere in between personal erasure and a Buddhist-like surrendering of material possessions, the past twenty years of Mike Smith’s art, all made while he lived in Soho. This dual sale—of art and life—turns the Open House installation into both a marketing pitch and a memoir. It presents the artist’s two-decade trajectory in Soho: video-taped documentation of the rigorous building of the loft, which in itself resembles a durational performance art piece of the 1970s, his multi-faceted, multi-media art, his activism, and his personal evolution, all with a price-tag. Presented at a critical juncture in the fictional artist’s life, Mike’s story with Soho ends where Open House begins, with the desire to leave the neighborhood, or what it has become, for some place more affordable and less pretentious.

This interview with Michael Smith took place in anticipation of the launch of an online version of Open House—a project that was realized thanks to my colleague John Michael Boling, who worked with Smith to transfer the work from DVD to the web.

Lisi Raskin, an artist known for her whimsical military command centers and her cross-country information gathering van (official title: Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station), has produced a new project for Dia's ongoing Artists' Web Projects series. Titled Warning Warum, the website is a nuclear control panel that allows visitors to "bomb" locations of their choosing. The playful interface recalls Raskin's signature childlike style, complete with construction paper collages and handwritten buttons. The accompanying audio of the artist also reminds one of a kid at play, with Raskin chirping "beep beep" to replicate the sound of morse code or "oooeeewwwww" for the missile launch. Raskin's style of interface aesthetics emerges from her own upbringing in 1980s America, where the Cold War and the fear of a nuclear blast were in the air. Her low-fi reconstructions can be understood as an intentionally imprecise attempt to come to terms with the threat of nuclear disaster, an event so horrific and overwhelming as to be almost outside the realm of human comprehension.

"Virtual data isn't subject to decay like traditional media. Despite this, we can still lose personal data to disk failure, viruses, or accidental deletion. Unlike personal data however, data on the internet has a seemingly infinite shelf-life. Between search-engine caching, cloud-hosting, re-blogging, plagiarizing, and the way-back machine, the net collects and eternally stores vast amounts of information.

Temporary.cc eschews this paradigm. For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website's code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.

Eventually, like tangible media, Temporary.cc will fall apart entirely, becoming a blank white website. Its existence will be remembered only by those who saw or heard about it."

This gallery-installation/internet-art hybrid automatically created sculptures using spam and e-mail to trigger the sculpting process. It consisted of a steel frame surrounding a large block of biodegradable (starch-based) Styrofoam. Attached to the frame is the Eroder: a mobile sprayer that squirted colored water on to the foam. Done in collaboration with Tony Muilenburg and commissioned by Rhizome.org.

Sprite Vampire () - Mike Ton and Brandon Thau"High School presentation for class experiment dissolving chicken bones in various soda. Sprite was the most destructive. 90% of my energy on this animation and only 10% on the actual lab work. Still managed an A though. Sound Fx and music is from Super Castlevania 4's sound mode. Very low rent :) "

Beef - Having it Your Way (1992)"Amiga animation 1992. It won Honorable mention, a second placing shared with a couple other pieces at The Homer Alaska Pratt Museum Spring Juried Arts Show (judged in actuality). Crude, rough AMIGA animation and sound, I submitted this at the prompting of my mom, and was quite surprised to get the award and attention."

Freak Alley - Steve Tiffany

Fakin Garstang"Hiking in the hills of Garstang on a serene day until a mindless youth comes along and attacks this innocent hiker."

A Sea Trek - Felipe Magana

Amiga AnimationSomehow, back in high school, I was put in a special "computers in art" program which had an actual working artist and a room full of Amiga computers (which were the top of the line back then). Anyrate, these poorly recorded images are all that remains of that experience.

Scheduled for its New York premiere this Sunday, November 22, Case is an experimental adaptation of the 1984 novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Considered a classic work of the literary genre cyberpunk, Neuromancer tells the story of Case, a fallen super hacker whose glory days have long since ended, leaving him in a drug-addled, regret-ridden state that lifts when a mysterious entity offers him a second chance. Charged, kaleidoscopic, and prescient, Neuromancer dilates on virtual reality, artificial intelligence and a globalized world through the intricacies of Case’s story. Case (2009), conceived and produced by artist Brody Condon, will be a day-long installation and performance that, in the artist’s words combines “Gibson’s 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with faux ‘virtual reality’ scenes that will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara.” I asked Condon a few questions in advance of the New York premiere so readers, near and far, could get a sense of how this ambitious work will unfold on Sunday.

Brody Condon: One core theme of Gibson's novel is addiction and transcendence, and is embodied by the hacker Case. The performance will feature Ray "Bad Rad" Radtke, an infamous Midwestern hell-raiser and activist, reading as the main character. This work started as a series of interviews with Ray, which I mashed ...

The current exhibition at Art in General is “Erratic Anthropologies", which features Guy Benfield, Shana Moulton, Rancourt/Yatsuk, and Hong-An Truong, who construct narratives through video and performance that investigate a host of social subcultures (from hippie crafters to failed south Florida housing developers). In collaboration with Performa 09, a special series of performances have been organized to accompany the show. Last Wednesday, November 10, Benfield, Moulton, and Rancourt/Yatsuk performed in temporary environments in the gallery space. They will perform again tonight at 7pm. Rhizome Curatorial Fellow Jenny Jaskey writes about Shana Moulton’s "The Undiscovered Antique."

In a crowded room on Wednesday night, video and performance artist Shana Moulton presented the ninth installment of Whispering Pines, a series in which her alter ego Cynthia relishes the life-changing potential of home décor, beauty routines, and self-help mantras. Cynthia’s obsession in this episode, entitled The Undiscovered Antique, focuses on her journey to confirm the value of personally meaningful domestic artifacts á la The Antiques Roadshow. Moulton’s work is a layering of video, performance, and prop staging that is, in its more effective moments, abstract and dreamlike. In the spirit of Sara Goldfarb minus the amphetamines, Cynthia fantasizes about the transcendental payoff of her kitsch consumer fetishes, which include a head massager and footbath. Moulton achieves this sense of escapism by fully integrating her character into a two-dimensional digital landscape: projected objects move in choreographed syncopation with Cynthia’s body, sometimes appearing to control its movement or color its surface.

Moulton’s work makes us particularly attuned to the social structure surrounding its protagonist through its exaggerated and fragmented representation of Cynthia’s environment. It uses this fiction as a means for creating a kind of framed anthropological analysis ...